If you live in Dallas and haven’t considered the question, this may be the time. Because Rawlings, who is a very smart and able mayor, is posing the question.

He’s asking — tacitly, through his actions — if you’re willing to trade a certain measure of transparency for a shot at real change in this city. He’s asking for some leaps of faith, or at least of public confidence.

As my colleague Scott Goldstein wrote in our Sunday editions (if you haven’t seen his thorough and thought-provoking story, go read it now), there’s a simmering tension at City Hall. It’s over what some council members view as the mayor’s propensity to take matters into his own hands without consulting them.

Tensions, ranging from a simmer to an evaporative-steam boil — are not exactly news at Dallas City Hall. What’s interesting about this round is Rawlings’ apparent application of corporate discretion to public business, which means purposely inviting some players to the party a lot later than others.

Goldstein cites three recent topics that were clearly well past the preliminary stages when they popped into public view.

There was the disclosure Rawlings created a task force that is holding closed-door meetings to brainstorm the future of Fair Park.

There was the bulletin that a plan for pitching Dallas as the site of the 2016 National Republican Convention is not only in the works but has seemingly sprung, fully formed, like Venus from the head of Zeus.

But by far the most ambitious (or audacious) under-the-radar initiative is the Support Our Public Schools home-rule charter proposal for the Dallas Independent School District.

Rawlings isn’t an official member of the board examining the issue. But he is one of the idea’s earliest and now its most public proponent.

The discussions could eventually lead to a voter referendum on whether Dallas will be the first school district in the state to take advantage of a rather open-ended option to reconfigure itself under local control — maybe with a completely retooled organizational structure.

None of the above is illegal or even unethical: The law says city business must be conducted in public, but informal advisory groups can operate in private.

What this adds up to depends on whom you ask. Plenty of critics, including but not limited to those council colleagues who think Rawlings is cutting them out of the information loop, see a Machiavellian power grab. They see a handful of privileged, rich business types calling the shots behind the scenes in the old, paternalistic Dallas Citizens Council tradition.

Others see the forceful, charismatic mayor Dallas has long needed to address its most intractable urban problems. At the top of the list is the steady erosion of the city’s middle class, and the growing divide between Dallas’ moneyed elite “haves” and its chronically disadvantaged “have-nots.”

This city, like countless others, has heard years of earnest talk about “bold initiatives” and “sense of urgency” and “mandate for change” to reverse that destructive erosion. Rawlings seems determined to push that talk past the familiar breakdown stage — we’ve seen a lot of this — wherein the “bold initiatives” are steadily choked by inertia and political pie fights.

Yes, Rawlings seems to say, government is transparent — after a certain point. All the players will have their say eventually, but that doesn’t mean they need to be briefed on every single idea from its moment of germination.

It’s not a big surprise that this attitude does not always mesh with Dallas’ complicated power matrix. The final year of Rawlings’ current term — the man has a remarkable talent for refusing to be pressed on his plans or opinions before he’s ready, and hasn’t said whether he’ll run again — is sure to be a lively one.

In the meantime, it’s plain that there are major discussions taking place outside the public view. Maybe it’s a deliberate and unwarranted obfuscation of the transparency we have a right to expect from government.

Or maybe it’s a real chance, finally, for a serious, meaningful change to the city’s most entrenched problems, real hope for its most hardened cynics.